Blood Song (Raven's Shadow 1)

Antesh didn’t turn back. “Do you require something of me, brother?”

The blood-song gave a short murmur of unease, not the shrill warning of impending attack, but a suggestion of deception. He hides something. “I’d like to hear more of Darkblade,” Vaelin said. “If you would care to tell me.”

“That would mean learning more of the Ten Books. Aren’t you afraid your soul will be sullied by such knowledge? Your faith undone?”

The Cumbraelin’s words summoned Hentes Mustor from his memory, seeing again the guilt and the madness in the Usurper’s eyes. The blood-song’s murmur grew louder. Did he know him? Had he been one of his followers? “I doubt any knowledge could sully a man’s soul. And as I told your Trueblade, my Faith cannot be undone.”

“The First Book tells us to teach the truth of the World Father’s love to any who wish to hear it. Find me again and I’ll tell you more, if you wish.”

In the evenings he would make his way to Ahm Lin’s shop where his wife would scowl murderously as she poured tea and the stonemason would coach him in the ways of the song.

“Amongst my people it’s called the Music of Heaven,” Ahm Lin explained one night. They were in the workshop, sipping tea from small porcelain bowls next to the statue of the wolf, which appeared more unnervingly real every time Vaelin visited. The mason’s wife wouldn’t allow Vaelin into the house itself where she invariably secluded herself after pouring the tea. He had once made the mistake of suggesting they pour it themselves which had provoked such an outraged glare that he waited until Ahm Lin took a sip from his own cup for fear she had poisoned the beverage.

“Your people?” Vaelin asked. He had deduced that the mason hailed from the Far West but knew little of the place beyond the tales of sailors, fanciful stories of a vast land of endless fields and great cities where the Merchant Kings held sway.

“I was born in the province of Chin-Sah under the benevolent rule of the great Merchant King Lol-Than, a man who knew well the value of those with unusual gifts. When mine became known to the village elders I was taken from my family at age ten and brought to the king’s court, to be tutored in the Music of Heaven. I remember I was terribly homesick but never tried to run away. It was the law that the treason of the son extends to the father and I didn’t wish him to suffer for my disobedience, though I longed to return to his shop and work the stone again. He was a mason too, you see.”

“There is no shame in the Dark in your homeland?”

“Hardly, it is seen as a blessing, a gift from Heaven. A family with a gifted child gains great honour.” His expression clouded. “Or so it was said.”

“So you were taught the song? You know how to use it, you know where it comes from.”

Ahm Lin smiled sadly. “The song cannot be taught, brother, and it doesn’t come from anywhere. It is simply what you are. Your song is not another being living inside you. It is you.”

“The song of my blood,” he murmured recalling the words of Nersus Sil Nin in the Martishe.

“I have heard it called that, a name that suits well enough.”

“So, if it cannot be taught, what could they teach you?”

“Control, brother. It is like any other song, to sing it well it must be practised, honed, perfected. My tutor was an old woman called Shin-La, so old she had to be carried around the palace on a litter and couldn’t see more than a foot or two beyond her nose. But her song…” He shook his head in wonder at the memory. “Her song was like fire, burning so bright and loud you felt blinded and deafened by it all at once. The first time she sang to me I nearly fainted. She cackled and called me Rat, little Singing Rat, Ahm Lin in the language of my people.”

“She sounds a harsh teacher,” Vaelin observed, reminded of Master Sollis.

“Harsh, yes she was that, but she had much to teach me and little time left in which to do it. Our gift is extremely rare, brother, and in all her long life of service to the Merchant King and his father before him, she had never met another singer. I was her replacement. Her lessons were harsh, painful. She needed no stick to strike me, her song could hurt me well enough. It started with the truth telling, two men would be brought in, one having committed a crime of some sort. Each would claim innocence and she would ask me which was guilty. Every time I got it wrong, and it happened often at first, her song would lash me with its fire. ‘Truth is the heart of the song, Rat,’ she would say. ‘If you cannot hear truth, you cannot hear anything.’

“Once I had mastered the art of hearing truth, the lessons became more complex. A servant would be given a token, a precious jewel or ornament, and told to hide it somewhere within the palace. If I didn’t find it by nightfall they could keep it, and I would be punished for its loss. Later, a large group of people would mill around one of the courtyards, talking at the top of their voices, with one of them carrying a dagger beneath their robes. I had only five minutes to find it before her song would stab me as the dagger would have stabbed our master. For, as she never failed to remind me, I owed all to him and to fail him would be my eternal shame.”

“The Merchant King made use of your song?”

“Indeed he did. Commerce is the life-blood of the Far West, those that trade well become great men, even kings of men, and successful commerce requires knowledge, especially knowledge others wish to keep hidden.”

“You were a spy?”

Ahm Lin shook his head. “Merely a witness to the affairs of greater and richer men. At first Lol-Than would have me sit in the corner of his throne room, playing with his children, if anyone asked I was said to be his ward, orphan son of a distant cousin. Naturally, most assumed I was his bastard, an unimportant but nonetheless honoured position at court. As I played, men would come and go with varying degrees of ceremony and protracted effusions of respect or regret at besmirching the king’s palace with their unworthy presence. I noted the richer the man’s clothes or the larger his entourage, the more he would proclaim his abject unworthiness at which Lol-Than would assure them no insult had been suffered and offer his apologies for not providing a more ostentatious welcome. It could take an hour or more before the true reason for the visit became apparent, and it was almost always about money. Some wanted to borrow it, others were owed it, and all wanted more of it. And as they talked, I would listen. When they were gone, with an assurance the king would give them a swift answer and an apology for the appalling discourtesy of delaying response to their request, he would ask me what song the music of Heaven had sung during the conversation.

“Being but a boy I had little notion of the true import of these affairs, but my song didn’t need to know why a man lied or deceived, or hid hatred behind smiles and great respect. Lol-Than knew why, of course, and in knowing saw the road to either profit or loss, or occasionally the axe-man’s block.

“And so I lived my life at the Merchant King’s palace, learning from Shin-La, telling the truth of my song to Lol-Than. I had few friends, only those permitted me by the courtiers appointed my guardians. They were a dull lot mostly, happy but unquestioning children from the minor merchant families who had bought a place at court for their offspring. In time I came to realise my playmates were chosen for their dullness, their lack of guile or cunning. Friends with sharper minds would have sharpened my own thoughts, made me consider that this pleasant life of luxury and plenty was in reality nothing more than an ornate cage, and I a slave within it.

“There were rewards of course, as I grew to manhood and the lusts of youth took me. Girls if I wanted, boys if I wanted. Fine wine and all manner of bliss-giving potions if I asked, though never enough to dull the sound of my song. When I grew too old to play with Lol-Than’s children I became one of his scribes, there were always at least three at every meeting and no one seemed to notice that my calligraphy was clumsy and often barely legible. Life in my cage was simple, untroubled by the trials of the world beyond the tall walls that surrounded me. Then Shin-La died.”

His gaze had become distant, lost in the memory, shrouded in sorrow. “It is not an easy thing for a singer to hear another’s death song. It was so loud I wondered the whole world couldn’t hear it. A scream of such anger and regret it sent me reeling into oblivion. Sometimes I think she was trying to take me with her, not out of spite, but duty. In hearing her final song I understood that her devotion to Lol-Than was a lie, the greatest of lies since she managed to keep it from her song throughout all the years she had taught me. Her final song was the scream of a slave who had never escaped her master and didn’t wish to leave me there alone. And she showed me something, a vision, born of the song, a village, ruined, smoking, littered with corpses. My village.”

He shook his head, his voice laden with such sadness that Vaelin realised he was the first person to hear this story. “I was so blind,” Ahm Lin continued after a moment. “I failed to realise that the value in my gift lay in no-one knowing of its existence. No-one save Lol-Than and the old woman I would replace. I remembered all the people Shin-La had used in her lessons, all the suspected criminals and servants, there must have been hundreds over the years. I knew they could never be allowed to live with the knowledge of my gift. I had killed them merely by being in their presence.